AMD claims teraflop breakthrough with Firestream chip

AMD claims its new specialist high-performance processor the Firestream 9250, is the first to process more than a more than a thousand billion single-precision floating point operations (one teraflop) per second.

The Firestream, announced at the International Supercomputing Conference, is designed to accelerate critical algorithms in high-performance computing (HPC) applications and exploits the graphics processing expertise AMD gained when it purchased ATI.

The Firestream 9250, which occupies a single PCI slot, uses less than 150 watts to deliver an efficiency of up to eight gigaflops per watt.

Rival Nvidia has been promoting the use of its graphics processors for similar tasks, with the aid of a C-based language called Cuda.